We invite you to share your experiences and to post information about advocacy, research and other gifted education issues on this free public discussion forum.CLICK HEREto Log In. Click herefor the Board Rules.

On the other side of the coin, there are as whole lot of parents and students who are mildly fixated to rabidly obsessed with IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS!! for many wrong reasons (status, the Mecca-like quality these places have in some people's imaginations, the (generally incorrect) assumption of future connections, etc).

A new study circulating through hedge funds and university campuses points to the powerful role that old-school ties play in the world of investing.

Mutual fund managers invest more money in companies that are run by people with whom they went to college or graduate school than in companies where they have no such connections, the study found. The investments involving school ties, on average, also do significantly better than other investments.

The authors of the study offer two possible explanations — one benign and one decidedly not. Fund managers may simply know more about their old classmates, including which ones are likely to make good executives. The alternate explanation is that those executives may be passing along inside information to the fund managers.

The researchers do not take a position about which explanation is more likely.

“Everything we have is consistent with both explanations,” said Andrea Frazzini, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and one of the study’s three authors. But he added, “We have no evidence of wrongdoing by any of these fund managers.”